This Is The Thread Where We Praise And Canonize Paul McCartney's "Ram"

HERE WE GO!

Go ahead and buy "Ram". It can't be that expensive, and you'll probably like it. It has the most extensive Beach Boys homage of his solo work, and some good examples of that sort of linear song structure at which he excels (where it's just a progression of bits rather than verse-chorus-verse). Yes, there's some goofy and even embarassing bits on it, but anyone buying a Macca record knows to expect that. It's a totally unpretentious and, at times, charming album.

Nice haiku, Begs2Differ!

"Fluff, sure, but darn catchy fluff!" - Roger Catlin, Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, 1996.

"Brimming with melodies and intriguing ideas!" - William Ruhlmann, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.

"Most of the songs are so lightweight they float away even as Paulie layers them down with caprices!" - Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.

"There are some nice moments...It's like watching someone juggle five guitars!" - Playboy, 9-71.

"wailing sentimentality!" - Billboard, 1971.

"I don't see how someone can play it and take in all that stuff and say 'I don't like it!" - Paul McCartney

?!

Jody say it ain't so! It's a decent record. I don't LOVE it or anything, but it's ok. I got a vinyl copy for free. "Too Many People" is a great song.

'Heart of the Country' is a nice jazzy thing that if it had been on the White Album and had some input from the other beatles would have been 10x better.

Paul's 'wigging out' moments like around 3'20 of 'Too Many People' are fucking deadly.

Haha. Yuppers.

I think I said this on another thread once, but I can only listen to Paul in moderation. I like many of his songs on the White Album, but if you listen to them all in a row, you'd be dead by Blackbird > Rocky Racoon.

Too Many People
3 Legs
Ram On
Dear Boy
Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey
Smile Away
Heart of the Country
Monkberry Moon Delight
Eat at Home
Long Haired Lady
Ram On (Reprise)
The Back Seat of My Car

*SNICKER*

I tried listening once. It wasn't very good.

Me no understand.

"Get Back" = Great
"Eat at Home" = Stinks?

Me no understand.

"Lady Madonna" = Classic
"Monkberry Moon Delight" = "The nadir in the decomposition of the sixties?"

Me no understand.

Has 'Monkberry Moon Delight' ever been sampled in a hip-hop track? 'Cause it damn well should be.

this record is great, my favorite Macca solo work

Absolutely.

Surely a great album, although he has done several better ones after he broke up Wings again.

Lately I've been wanting to add Big Barn Bed (from Red Rose Speedway) to Ram...it's got the weird catchy pot-smoking Ram vibe so much. I wonder if it was recorded at the same time?

Ah, it was. I thought I remembered a snippet of it on Ram.

i really like "ram".

the album with the bonus song "oh woman oh why" is the one to get, simply cos that song's a really funky stones-y dirge.

Perhaps some will find this interesting, perhaps not...

...but I'm rerecording "Ram" all by myself, track by track. Have a listen!

The Ram Project

Can't listen right now, but nice idea. I haven't ever heard Ram, i should probably track down the original before checking out your version anyway. Oh, and i've read that book, Tim, it's really good.

I wanna horse
I wanna sheep

Another Day and Oh Woman, Oh Why are so rad

didn't mean to be so aggro about this but if you're like "i, a person who likes the beatles and has thoughts about paul mccartney, only like two of the songs on his excellent album ram without qualification," afaic you are trying not to like it. free yourself

― STOCK FIST-PUMPER BRAD (BradNelson), Saturday, December 11, 2021 12:35 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Quoting without further comments

First time I heard this album I couldn't sleep the night because bits from it kept circling round my head

I know it's tongue-in-cheek, but in all seriousness, I don't like disliking music. It brings me no pleasure in having less music to enjoy, especially from someone who's already had a hand in creating so much of my favorite music. I give everything many chances because I don't believe in dismissing any work on the first try, or even the second or third time around. If people see a lot in something, I want to see what they're seeing too.

I've played Ram and really all of Paul's music many times - I still hold on to a lot of it "just in case" and that includes a copy of Ram. Even the worst stuff has something brilliant - a hook, the singing, a great bass line, etc. - and sometimes that feels like a saving grace but a lot of times it's frustrating coming from someone who's capable of delivering the whole package. I'm glad you guys love Ram, it amazes me that it's got a devoted following that swears by it, but honestly, I've never been able to sit through the whole thing without getting massively irritated half the time. I mean, Adam Sandler has his fans too, I can accept that without liking his shit. Meanwhile, I get a lot more out of Band on the Run, Run Devil Run and Memory Almost Full (which tbh I rejiggered with four cuts from Chaos & Creation but that's another story). I like Ram more than a lot of other Wings/McCartney albums, but I just don't see it being this landmark achievement of any kind. Calling it ground zero for indie pop always seemed like an enormous stretch, one that ignores a lot of music from the previous decade.

I guess that should be "I dislike Ram less than a lot of the Wings/McCartney albums"

It got dropped during some recent phone upgrade but for about 12 years my iPhone ringtone was the ukulele intro to “Ram On.”

One of the things I found listening to all the 70s McCartney releases was that the musical quality didn't correspond with any other aspect. You couldn't say, "He's only good when he:
- rocks (or does ballads)
- is serious (or is whimsical)
- is autobiographical (or writes characters)
- sounds familiar (or experiments)
- does rock and pop (or does other genres)"
...because he's done both good and bad material of all sorts. The one thing that unites the bad songs for me is a certain self-conscious attention to effects, like we can see Paul looking over the song with an arched eyebrow, thinking, "This is really gonna get 'em!"

Sure but there’s something about McCartney’s sheer skill as a performer and songwriter that almost always elevates the song above whatever conceit he’s concocted (this is super obvious in Get Back where his farting around on the soundstage is almost always interesting).

I think in part that’s why his work is so easy to go back to and re-examine. The conceit is transparent—“I’m going to do Tin Pan Alley/Buddy Holly//Little Richard/Elvis Costello here!”—but the execution is almost always more interesting in some way, even if not always mind-blowingly so.

Back on topic, I find “Hey Diddle” to be an absolute ear-worm. The sweet blend of Linda’s vocals with Paul’s, the third grade concert recorder interlude, the lilt in Linda’s voice on the line “Ah but don’t you fear/The next time around/She’ll be there.” Even if it wasn’t on the record proper, this thing just feels like the apotheosis of the Ram aesthetic.

'hey diddle; is indeed great, love this record but hadn't listened to unreleased cuts. 'rode all night' is downright weird

"Long Haired Lady" -- wow.

Best Paul song ever maybe

well, well, well, well, well!

is this the only thing you want me for?

Well, I've been meaning to talk to you about it for some time...

I put this album on the other day, and maaaannn... it's just back to back classssic

I love eating at home.

Man knew how to uke

McCartney / Ram / Wild Life / Red Rose Speedway is my favorite stretch of Paul, Ram definitely the strongest song-by-song but I adore all four. In fact, if someone told me I could never listen to the Beatles again but could keep this four-album run, I'd be totally okay with that.

I was with you till the second sentence. It feels a bit sad to me that it's his first four I love most, but I can't really deny it.

for me it's Ram, McCartney II and Tug Of War. I'd be more likely to listen to any of these than any Beatles album save perhaps Rubber Soul these days - not that I don't like the Beatles, but those have passed the test of time.

funny that n one really bangs on about Band On The Run like they used to. Is it just cos it's played-out?

I don't know what happened there either. On my first run through the Wings catalogue I was crazy about Band on the Run, and then one day it just faded.

For a while, a couple years back (actually in a conscious effort to rescue the album, ha) I made it the soundtrack to evenings dancing stupidly around the room with my infant daughter. If the pleasure of those evenings stuck to the music as I intended, I might like it again now.

"No Words," "Mamunia," "Bluebird" -- ew.

band on the run is just kinda boring

happy birthday, Paul!

I have to admit that in all my time of listening to McCartney, I couldn't tell you what anything past Let me Roll It sounds like, despite enjoying almost everything up to that point... My attention just drifts

Funny that Let Me Roll It has significantly more plays on Spotify than Mrs Vandebilt, which I assume is the more famous song

HO
HEY HO

I like every song on BOTR, *love* the sound of it (very much a continuation of the Ram->RRS arc), but would allow that the obvious silliness of the lyrics probably hurts it, as with RRS. Ram has a lot of silliness, too, but it has a consistent mood/tone, this distinctive mix of late psychedelia and down-home country flavor, not to mention some of his most interesting writing... it's always felt simultaneously very of-a-piece and very sonically generous.

BOTR has bigger hits, doesn't overstay its welcome, and absolutely does some very "Paul" things very well. But maybe its prior reputation was buoyed a bit by the appearance of a "concept," to listeners/critics eager for something that felt more directly like Sgt. Pepper's or Abbey Road?

Let Me Roll It probably got a streaming boost from Licorice Pizza, though maybe not a huge one. I've never heard Mrs. Vandebilt apart from listening to the album...

BOTR has bigger hits, doesn't overstay its welcome, and absolutely does some very "Paul" things very well. But maybe its prior reputation was buoyed a bit by the appearance of a "concept," to listeners/critics eager for something that felt more directly like Sgt. Pepper's or Abbey Road?

Yup. Always with early McCartney appraisal is knocking him for being an idiot when we know he can "do" concepts and things. Early rock critics were an earnest bunch.

Hmm.. I'm listening to the second half of BOTR and it is flimsy compare to the opening five tracks

I love Ram as much as any Beatles album.

I really fell in love with it over the pandemic. Found an unopened promo copy in a stack of stuff and began playing for the kids when we would get out of the house for a bit and go to the park / drive around aimlessly. They weren't so into the beatles (yet), but couldn't get enough of Ram. We still pull it out from time to time -- I have a decent LP of it as well -- and we just bask in it. It's such a blast!

HO
HEY HO

― hungover beet poo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 18 June 2025 15:27 (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Wait... is this reprised from something on Ram, or is it my imagination?

Ram is so much a staple of stuff that got played around us as kids that my sister will "quote" lines from it at each other: "Butter pie?" "The butter wouldn't melt so I put it in the pie / Alright?"

Hmm.. I'm listening to the second half of BOTR and it is flimsy compare to the opening five tracks

― DLC Soundsystem (dog latin),

I agree but "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five" though. Our local AOR station played it well into the '90s.

Another thing about Ram that I really love is that it feels like its own world. I don't know if I have those same feelings about any other Paul project other than Pepper.

Was just coming to defend 1985, as good as anything on side 1

"silly love songs" > every song on band on the run, by a long way

I agree but "Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five" though. Our local AOR station played it well into the '90s.

― hungover beet poo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 18 June 2025 15:48 (fifty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Hadn't heard it before!

HO, HEY HO shows up again during that fade out of Picasso's Last Word. They throw a bit of Jet in there too.

Listening to Picasso as I just was, the string arrangements that pop up in some sections are very Electric Light Orchestra.

Silly Love Songs and Let Em In are fantastic.

Sadly a version of Let Em In has been used prominently as part fo a long running advertising campaign in the UK, which tarnishes it slightly. But I've always said I'd like it played as my funeral song

I've always said I'd like it played as my funeral song

What! Awesome!

I think my Band on the Run ploy worked. I got all excited a moment ago just looking at the tracklist

my plan has always been to follow Paul into the '80s and '90s as the years pass and i grow to be the same age he was when he made those albums. i don't want to feel the pressure of listening to all of his material from that era and deciding if i like it right now. there's no rush

Xp Yes. And as the slouching defeat of the pipes and drums outro brings people to horrible tears, I will sit bolt upright in my coffin during the surprise fake-out, wink at the congregation, shriek an ungodly shriek, then lay back down forever

In all seriousness, Let Em In was playing during the assessment for my blood donation today and that was a difficult-to-concentrate-on moment

late to this party but will add that Paul seems a big let me roll it fan himself, his 9th most performed song according to setlist fm (and he did indeed play it when i saw him)

Another thing about Ram that I really love is that it feels like its own world. I don't know if I have those same feelings about any other Paul project other than Pepper.

― Blood On The Knobs, Wednesday, 18 June 2025 15:07 (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I have the big deluxe "Ram" box, and it's non-disc extras like notebooks, sketches, flick-books and whatever else, are totally charming and lovely. As you say, it's its own world.

Yeah for sure